>Also, being an early miner in any protocol is going to have advantages. I know people who mined 50 BTC block rewards on a home computer. But over time, early miners sell. They got it fairly. This is an unavoidable circumstance when it comes to any system. 

Yes, I agree, this happens with all chains, and in fact pretty much all investments.  Some will get in early; some of it is pure luck, some of it is folks who are busting their ass with market research and being active in communities.  People are simply born at different times...nothing we can do about that!

And more broadly, there is no such thing as a perfect system, all monetary systems have flaws, it is unavoidable.  And even MORE broadly speaking, there is no such thing as "fair", as everyone has different beliefs on what is fair or not.  Nobody owes anyone anything, those that did well here at HIVE can control their votes and HP however they like, with no obligation to anyone.

> Bidbot owners did nothing wrong ...

From their point of view they did nothing wrong. On the one side it is understandable that they tried to maximize their profits, but it is also true that they made sure not <em>quality</em> content was successful and 'trending' but <em>paid</em> content. So yes, I think it was 'wrong' (or at least bad for the platform and <em>these</em> content creators who didn't join that bidbot game), even if humanly understandable.
After bidbotting was more or less over, then curation sniping was the new trend: voting automatically after 3 or 4 minutes without reading anything to get the biggest piece of the curation cake. I really appreciate that after the last HF this curation problem got fixed, but the former bidbot owners and later curation snipers had had already plenty of opportunity to massively benefit.

I think early miners did nothing wrong at all. But that's not my point.

Apart from any moral aspect which might not matter here, both types of users are now dominating the chain.

> I am a top 5 stakeholder and have never reached the top 20 consensus as a witness

Congrats, you really deserve that in my eyes! (And I am 'proud' #8 whale in Splinterlands now concerning collection power; that's where I finally decided to invest money which could have gone to HIVE instead, and where nobody had such a huge advantage from the beginning.)
You (and also @aggroed) are comparable new and in a certain way no members of the 'club' of witnesses which occupy the top ranks since the early STEEM days. There are mostly still the same names on top which I know since 2016/17!

I didn't mean to say witnesses are vote trading (sorry, in case I was not clear, but English is also not my mother tongue). I meant they vote each other for witnesses and thus make sure to control the chain.
I personally also don't like common non-transparent practices like creating anonymous accounts like for example @usain(down)vote, delegating them HP, let them downvote posts and rejecting every own responsibility, same with lending posting keys (these days for example 'you' flagged one of my chess posts without knowing it because someone else had used your posting key; I mentioned that in my <a href="https://peakd.com/hive/@jaki01/time-for-a-hive-break-powerdown">last real post</a> about 1.5 years ago).

I don't expect you to share my points of view and that's OK with me. I wish you much success and despite my criticism I hope that HIVE will thrive. Maybe one day I will try to post again.